What I do like about it is that it’s an easy reading, almost-conversational-blog sprinkled-with-humor style summary of what appear to be fairly crunchy concepts in research, just distilled without having to wade through pages of jargon down to a level where a layperson can grasp the surface and make use of.

One of the more interesting summarized concepts was that a person can have a promotion or a prevention focus when it comes down to chasing goals.

Promotion-focused goals are thought about in terms of achievement and accomplishment. They are about doing something you would ideally like to do. In the language of economics, they are about maximizing gains (and avoiding missed opportunities).

Prevention-focused goals are thought about in terms of safety and danger. They are about fulfilling responsibilities, doing the things you feel you ought to do. In economic terms, they are about minimizing losses, trying to hang on to what you’ve got.

This goes a long way towards explaining my puzzlement at the odd sense of relief I get when successfully completing a raid boss, as contrasted by the elation I see other people experience.

When you set a goal for yourself and reach it, you feel good. That much is obvious. But what does “good” feel like?

When your goal is an achievement, a gain, you feel happy—joyful, cheerful, excited, or, in the vernacular of a typical teenager, totally stoked. It’s a high-energy kind of good feeling to reach a promotion goal.

It’s a very different kind of good to reach a prevention goal. When you are trying to be safe and secure, to avoid losing something, and you succeed, you feel relaxed—calm, at ease, peaceful. You breathe the sweet sigh of relief. This is a much more low-energy kind of good feeling, but not any less rewarding.

When I read the above paragraphs, I was amazed at just how right on the money it sounded.

Some of this subconscious choice of focus might be due to personality, or culture, or upbringing, but evidently I skew a lot more towards prevention where this is concerned.

(East Asians are enmeshed in a culture that revolves around saving face, it rubs off, even if you’d like to be optimistic and gain-focused. Singaporeans have the terms “kiasu” and “kiasi” – the Hokkien root word “kia” literally means “fear” or “afraid.”)

We could share the same goal of wanting to down the raid boss, but where someone else might be focused on the -gain-, on the prize and rewards and prestige and glory and satisfaction of a successful kill, my focus tends to end up on:

“I hope I’m not screwing up too badly, to the point that they kick me, cos that will mean more difficulty and obstacles in the path of Legendary armor collection” or;

“This group is not doing so well, we’re missing something, what are we missing, where is the flaw in the team that stands in our path of success, how can this flaw be fixed, either by the person responsible -is it possible to communicate this flaw without a drama blowout- or by me covering what’s missing.”

“What else can I be doing to ensure success? Am I making mistakes that I need to avoid or not do so much of? Am I fulfilling my roles and responsibilities in a raid without slipping up?”

Little wonder by the time a group I’m in first successfully downs a boss, I’m exhausted and relieved.

As for the opposite feeling, Halvorson had this to say:

The focus of your goal also determines the particular kind of bad you feel when things go wrong. In fact, Higgins first discovered the difference between promotion and prevention when he was trying to explain why some people reacted to their failures with anxiety, while others reacted by sinking into depression.

When you are going for gain, trying to accomplish something important to you, and you fail, you tend to feel sadness—dejected, depressed, despondent. As a teen might put it, totally bummed. It’s the low-energy kind of bad feeling—the kind that makes you want to lay on the couch all day with a bag of chips.

But failing to reach a prevention goal means danger, so in response you feel the high-energy kinds of bad feeling—anxiety, panic, nervousness, and fear. You freak out. Both kinds of feelings are awful, but very differently so.

Suddenly I understand why I ended up keyed up in a ball of nervous thwarted frustration in the early days, without the safety of a static group to fall back on.

I needed that safety, that ego defence of:

a) you have successfully killed all the bosses, ergo you do not suck,

b) you have a static group that can successfully kill all the bosses weekly, ergo your achievement plans are not threatened,

c) you have a respectable amount of face-saving legendary insights, sufficient to make Legendary Armor even if your raid group crumbles overnight (notice the urge to catastrophize)

From afar, it’s a little bit sad that my initial motivation seemed to stem more from a place of fear, of danger avoidance, rather than “fun” or gain-seeking.

It does help to explain why other people seem to get a lot more positive kicks out of raiding than me, though.

(That’s not to say I’m incapable of promotion-focused goals. I find I’m more able to focus on that kind of stuff -now-, after the “safety”/”avoid danger” bits are already resolved.

I’m more able to relax and look for gains and “fun” now that a lot less is “at stake” – even if the stakes only really existed in my head.)

The silver lining to this ever-so-slightly neurotic cloud is that prevention-minded pessimists like me are apparently very good at self-monitoring and future improvement. We can’t help but keep thinking of “what can be done better next time” and picking apart our mistakes like it’s the end of the world to commit one.

Optimists, on the other hand, are more liable to say, “well, it could have been worse if I had done this, or if that happened…” in order to make themselves feel better, which according to Halvorson, means they tend to blind themselves more to their own faults to protect their ego, and thus improve at a slower pace than worry-wart pessimists, if at all.

True, all the above is a simplification and a generalization. Optimists vs Pessismists or Promotion vs Prevention dichotomies don’t exist only in black or white terms.

In reality, a person can vary between being pessimistic and optimistic from one moment to another, or choose to be promotion-focused for goal A and prevention-focused for goal B, and it’s probably useful to be aware and consciously decide to do so.

But as a high-level concept, I thought it was fairly interesting to be able to categorize our tendencies to think along two major paths that way.

I am starting to think that there is something seriously wrong with me.

I dread the writing of almost every blog post.

It’s not exactly for the lack of any ideas or anything to say – I could go grab one of the many writing prompts around the place; there are vague plans in my mind that I could share screenshots of my characters and talk about their backstories; there is a GW2 beta weekend going on that has already produced two impressions posts from the bountiful Bhagpuss; I have finished nearly all of the Trove things on the to-do list and either attempted or am making good progress on the others; I bought Savage Lands on a whim since it went on Steam sale and have been trying it out, just haven’t firmed up what I think about it yet, since it’s in Early Access and thus hard to make a judgment on…

… but it all remains rather ill-formed in my head, and all I want to do is just vegetate and watch some DOTA 2. (We’re almost at the last day now, 3 teams left.)

I think… part of the problem is that I can’t seem to muster up any enthusiasm lately.

Without that enthusiasm, without that excitement of “oh this is so cool and I want to share it with the world!” all I’m doing is feeding this general nihilistic sense of malaise and draining energy from the world at large, instead of something positive – which makes me want to say nothing instead. You know, the ol’ “If you can’t say anything good, then…”

I dunno, I have been -doing- a great many things, being productive and all, and generally feeding my secondary Achiever side, ticking off checklists, finishing collections, forming habits of repeat-this-loop-to-grind-and-earn-stuff but it all seems to be being done for the lack of anything better to do.

The primary Explorer side of me has been cast adrift and lost at sea for so long, it doesn’t quite know what to do with itself anymore.

Ok, new beta weekend? Oh, wait, it’s probably not that new since it’s likely the same content as the prior previews. And wait, if I explore too much now, am I not shooting myself further in the foot when it releases? Maybe I shouldn’t go crazy now.

So I go make a new Revenant, spend about 10 minutes painstakingly changing all the stats on the beta gear to Berserker in order to get a fair baseline for how it feels, and then take it for a spin in Cursed Shore. Dual swords is pretty cool, skill 3 is pretty nuts (though it does open yourself up to getting locked into a long animation, not so good in PvP perhaps but certainly awesomely Shiro-channeling OP on normal PvE mobs), the rest feel slightly slow and awkward, but that could be due to unfamiliarity.

I test the Shiro utility skills, and then think about trying them out in conjunction with one of the other three legends, glance at the traits panel, the weapon skills panel, and my mind just generally explodes and shuts down. The possibilities are pretty darned complicated, sorta like elementalist and engineer in the number of mix-and-match skills they could potentially have, and I just think, nah… maybe I’ll learn it when it goes live, or maybe I won’t bother to learn it at all.

Then I gamely make a necro and a guardian to test out their elite specialization… and I realize that I don’t have the focus to sit through another 10 minutes of switching all their gear to Berserker again. Meh, maybe tomorrow, I think, and just wear the default Celestial stats and thwap a few mobs with their skills. Mostly I just see their animations, read the skill bar and go, “hrm, okay” but it’s absolutely impossible to judge good or bad damage potential wearing Celestial, so that’s a wash for now.

Try Verdant Brink? … Nah. It’s just going to be more jungle on fire and at war with Mordrem again. More story frozen in time while we’re stuck waiting for the expansion to launch. More trying to speed-grind Masteries in too short a time. There’s not going to be any forward progress, nothing will be saved in beta, it just doesn’t feel ‘fun’ yet. Maybe tomorrow.

Then I log off and end up grinding even more in Trove.

Or I give that up and open Savage Lands, and realize that all survival crafting sandbox games are basically punch-tree, punch-rock, accumulate X numeric resources to craft the next thing simulators.